Buildings are the source of one half to three-quarters of greenhouse-gas emissions in most American cities. Los Angeles, Boston, Chicago, Houston, and six more large cities have joined forces to tackle the problem by targeting their biggest buildings. “The largest buildings tend to be 3 to 4 percent of the overall number of buildings but account for 40 to 50 percent of the square footage and energy consumption. You have this terrific opportunity to work with a handful of buildings and make a big dent,” says Laurie Kerr, director of the City Energy Project (CEP), which launched in late January.
CEP is, in many ways, an outgrowth of the Greener, Greater Buildings Plan, deployed under New York City’s former mayor Michael Bloomberg, which included a pioneering benchmarking program mandating annual energy and water-use reporting by nonresidential buildings larger than 50,000 square feet. Kerr, who helped write New York’s plan, says the data collected by the city since 2012 show that the least efficient big buildings use four to eight times as much energy as their most efficient counterparts, pointing to “a lot of low-hanging fruit” for boosting energy efficiency.
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